"At times, reading ROTC Kills, I worry that [John] Koethe has been too successful in eluding the demands of life. These poems are unusually short on references to living people—people who bring obligations—and some vitality disappears with them." Jonathan Farmer • Slate

"When the ship docked in Naples, photographer and journalists were waiting for him. [Ezra Pound] regaled them with a snappy Fascist salute and told an inquiring journalist who wanted to know when he had left the hospital: 'I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum.'" Luciano Mangiafico • Open Letters Monthly

"Who needs an arch of triumph when the smile on a mother’s face is proof of a victory that is just as viable? A smile in fact is an arch turned upside-down, an alternative to the culture of war." Liza Katz • Quarterly Conversation

"An incredibly realistic waxwork dummy of Sigmund Freud stood near the window. With its back to the world and disinclined to pay attention to anyone, it stood there quietly peering at a bookshelf of old classics and would inevitably annoy new customers. They’d stand behind it asking for some book or other, growing more and more agitated when they got no response, then they’d storm out muttering about the bad mannered proprietor." Brian Patten on Bernard Stone and the Turret Bookshop • Fortnightly Review

"Antonio was known as the 'good' Machado, in contrast to his not-so-good brother Manuel, a writer of less distinction and an official propagandist for the Falangist party. But Antonio was also known as the 'good' because that was the mock-heroic epithet he assigned to himself in his triumphantly modest self-portrait of 1908, 'Retrato.' Literally, the line reads, 'I am, in the best sense of the word, good' ('soy, en el buen sentido de la palabra, bueno')" Stephen Akey • Open Letters Monthly

"Once I decided to single-mindedly devote myself to [translating Inferno] for a number of years, it became a rare, intense, and slightly terrifying kind of fun—a bit like being on a roller coaster just as it drops from the high point." Mary Jo Bang in conversation with EC Belli • Circumference

"[I]f a country is in political chaos it would be misleading to read of tranquility and the magnificent silence emanating from a law and order dictatorship." Serafin Malay Syquia • Doveglion

"Yet, we can assume what Lopez means to point out is that his practice entails utilizing documents that do not belong to our conventional notion of authorship [...] most of them are written in the context of intellectual fields, wherein the convention is to suppress the individual, idiosyncratic writerly voice, in exchange for a distant tone of primed objectivity. Anyone who has had the joy of recently attending an academic conference will likely be able to attest to the anonymous homogeneity of this brand of prose." J Peter Moore on Tony Lopez • Free Verse

"The inscription on the tomb in the famous painting by Poussin, attributed to death—'I too am in Arcadia'—is a statement of the pastoral's limitation, but also of its immanent promise: to return us to life, refreshed, prepared to renew the struggle, without losing sight of the fact of limitation: of self, of the body, of bioregions, of the earth itself." Joshua Corey • Arcadia Project (pdf)

"What is [Michael Hartnett’s] tradition? The inescapable fact is that spiritually he belongs to both cultures. He suffers from a divided mind." Peter Sirr • Imram

"Nice Weather," Seidel's first volume since the career omnibus "Poems 1959-2009," is full of metrical howlers, bad puns, simplistic rhymes and offensive themes. And it is bubbling over with invention and wit and chutzpah and grace." Michael Robbins • Chicago Tribune

"[Frank] O'Hara was a far more emotionally demanding lover than any of Rivers's girlfriends. (As Rivers wrote of his relationships with women at the time: Q: 'Sure, you like sex with me, Larry. But what are your intentions?' A: 'To continue fucking you at the lowest possible price.')" Olivia Cole • Paris Review

"Larkin loved to provoke (perhaps his most quoted line was “Books are a load of crap”) yet was bewildered when people didn’t understand that he had been ironic, or writing in persona." William Logan • Poetry

"Through the manipulation of one circular character, [Emily] Dickinson grapples with the whole of the universe, as well as the hole at the universe’s center." Ben Doller • Evening Will Come

"The internet trails this book has blazed lead to a Stanford University library catalogue entry, to hollow Google Books and Open Library records, and u-turn to the Davis and Sheppard footnotes, before becoming lost in a torrent of ornithology. In fact, the only search results for the Mainstream Poetry Press refer back to this elusive book. This isn’t the only such case [...]. An Irish reader might just have to do the same [to consult David Annwn’s Arcs Through: The Poetry of Randolph Healy, Billy Mills and Maurice Scully (Dublin: Coelacanth Press, 2002)] —no copies are available in Dublin’s National Library or any major university library (UCC’s copy has been on order since 2003). And as a further illustration of the necessary self-referentiality of Irish avant-garde publishing, Coelcanath Press was run by one of the book’s subjects, Maurice Scully." Sarah Bennett on the Irish avant-garde • Wave Composition

"Everywhere in this book—as in [Elizabeth Willis's ]other work—beauty abounds: sonic beauty, syntactic beauty, imagistic beauty, but never without revealing its Janus-faced other, never without admitting that an afternoon strolling in the garden here equals ten thousand hours down the mineshaft over there." Five poetry microreviews • Boston Review

"Berryman, a recurrent presence in this volume, shares with [John] Montague an anatomising, in every sense, of marital and love affairs – though edged with hysteria, even violence, where Montague, in this delicate area, is a borrower from chivalric amour courtois traditions, albeit with the street noise of modern Paris in the background." Harry Clifton • Irish Times

"Amherst College believes an 1859 daguerreotype may well also be an image of the reclusive, beloved poet, by now in her mid-20s and sitting with her recently widowed friend, Kate Scott Turner. If so, it will shed new light on the poet who, by the late 1850s, was withdrawing further and further from the world." Alison Flood • Guardian

"Here we enter the territory staked out in the late Ken Smith's prophetic London poems of the 1980s. He saw what Thatcherism and the unfettered City would come to mean, with the poor "pressing to the windows like fog", and Dunmore bears out that vision while reaching into the awful privacy where the worst is preparing to happen." Sean O'Brien on Helen Dunmore • Guardian

"Just as, then, Pinker and Hunt see the sudden rise of literacy, publishing, and the novel as instigating (or at least assisting) the legal reforms that together form the Humanitarian Revolution in the eighteenth century, so the dispute structure of poetry from Homer forward helps to nourish three arenas of disputation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whose purpose—at least in the parliaments and law courts—is diminution of injury." Elaine Scarry • Boston Review

"A little outrage about the loss of libraries can go a long way, as the authors of The Library Book prove in page after page of affection and indignation printed here." Thomas McCarthy • Irish Examiner

"Sometimes it is place that urges the soul to speak, to describe and remember, to praise and eulogise; sometimes it is language itself that creates place." Aditi Machado on Amina Saïd • Asymptote

"Hadfield also shows how Spenser's immersion in the Irish countryside, with its "wilde fruit and salvage soyle", seeps generously into the imagined landscape of his poetry, transmuting the realities of this Elizabethan Wild West into the airy fantasies of an Elizabethan Narnia." Charles Nicholl • Guardian "Nonetheless Spenser is now high on the list of great poets that nobody reads. Just about the only thing that Karl Marx had in common with Philip Larkin was a loathing for Spenser." Colin Burrow • Literary Review "The challenging poet who emerges here appears closer to later Anglo-Irish writers - Swift, Yeats, MacNeice, C.S. Lewis, even Beckett (perhaps especially Beckett) - than he does to his English contemporaries. There are affinities too with Joyce in terms of exile and language. Hadfield's is not the postcolonial Spenser targeted by Edward Said, but a semicolonial author closer to Said's reading of Yeats as a "poet of decolonization"."Willy Maley • THE

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